1 Thessalonians 3:7 · World English Bible
1 Thessalonians 3:7 Meaning For This Cause
for this cause, brothers, we were comforted over you in all our distress and affliction through your faith.
What does 1 Thessalonians 3:7 mean?
Tend other people long enough and relief starts arriving from a direction your own circumstances do not control. Tend nobody and there is exactly one source of news about whether life is going well, which is a person's own circumstances, so when those turn hard the state has nothing else to run on.
From the Self-Help reading below.
1 Thessalonians 3:7 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Self-Help
SELF-HELP
Self-Help
Tend other people long enough and relief starts arriving from a direction your own circumstances do not control.
Tend nobody and there is exactly one source of news about whether life is going well, which is a person's own circumstances, so when those turn hard the state has nothing else to run on. Plant yourself in others and a second line opens, carrying word of how they are holding up.
Paul's afflictions did not lift; what reached him was their faith standing, and that kind of report exists only for someone who has already spent enough of themselves on other people to have something come back. The cost of investing in no one is a life whose entire emotional weather is set by whatever is currently happening to the person living it.
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Self-Help lens
Live 1 Thessalonians 3:7 today
- Keep one piece of good news about somebody else where you can see it this week, a text, a photo, a voice message you saved. Read it on the bad afternoon instead of your own inbox.
- Check in on one person you have been quietly carrying, with no agenda and no update about yourself. "How is it going with your mom?" Then let the answer land on you.
- On the day your own numbers are terrible, spend fifteen minutes helping somebody with theirs. The relief that comes back arrives from a direction your situation does not control.
Whose good week could lift mine, if I had stayed close enough to hear about it?
The same truth in other traditions
Buddhism · sympathetic joy
Gladness at how another person is holding up is treated as a real strength to train, because it gives the heart a supply line that your own fortunes do not control.
Stoicism · Marcus Aurelius
We were made for each other the way hands and eyelids were, and what reaches one of us travels. A man who serves no one has only his own weather to live in.
Judaism · Pirkei Avot
Get yourself a companion. A life measured only by what is happening to you is a very small instrument for reading how things are going.
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